PM's Ultimate Guide to Social Media Sanity

First Facebook, then Twitter, then Tumblr, FourSquare and Google Plus. As the networks proliferate, keeping up our digital identities takes more and more time, and there's always another network to join. How do you maintain a digital life without going bonkers or completely neglecting your real life? We spoke to social media professionals, gurus and even addicts to help pull together a guide to streamlining your digital presence.

Social Media Madness

Social Media Madness

Social media's ubiquity means that we can now be connected to hundreds, even thousands of friends, acquaintances or random strangers online. For some, it can easily spin out of control and create a disconnect from real life—in addition to being an egregious waste of time. Managing multiple social media accounts has led some otherwise well-adjusted people to become overwhelmed, distracted—or worse.

But for many of us, completely unplugging from our digital selves isn't a viable option. So how do we stay plugged in but also keep our sanity (and have time to get our real work done)? Through a combination of smart, simple strategies and a few handy tech tools, it can be done.

The Basics

The Basics

First, get organized. Clutter on your digital desktop can be just as poisonous to productivity as a mess on your actual desk's surface. But it can be tough to keep your computer's desktop streamlined when you've got windows open for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and GChat (among others) in addition to your actual work. Experts tell PM that before you start thinking about social media timesaving strategies, make sure your desktop is in order. And if you're not already, get to be a whiz at tabbed browsing so Web browser windows don't overwhelm your screen's real estate.

Operating systems now come with more features to help compartmentalize your digital spaces, like the Spaces function in Apple's Mac OS X. Spaces allows you to shuffle between different desktops and keep some things out of view—like your Facebook page, when your boss is headed toward your cube or you simply want to keep your concentration on the task at hand. Or you could use hardware rather than software means to achieve some visual organization, such as adding an extra monitor. Adding another screen instantly gives you more pixels at your disposal and helps you designate separate tasks and functions to separate physical spaces. And for multitaskers, a second monitor can let you dedicate one screen solely to social media while you work on the other.

Don't forget to get organized on your mobile device, too. Most smartphones have multiple "desktops" that can be customized to group apps and documents together. Organizing all your social media apps on one desktop gives you a central portal from which to manage your accounts on your phone.

And cut the fat. If you're still getting emails from Friendster, MySpace or some other service that's long since fallen out of favor, use them as a reminder to migrate your contacts to your email or to another network, then delete the account. That's one less thing to worry about updating (and one less thing to worry about getting hacked).